The little miracles that saved Kaveh Akbar, author of ‘Martyr!’, one of the novels of the year

One day during the first act of Kaveh Akbar’s life, the man who is today a poet and novelist held a bag full of whiskey and beer in one hand while with the other, he drunkenly steered his bicycle. A car passed in front of him, he hit the rear break of his bike and fell to the ground. He didn’t immediately realize it, but he’d just shattered his pelvis. Akbar managed to call a friend, who came to pick him up, lugging his tall, thin frame back to the writer’s apartment. Once there, they didn’t stop until they’d drank all the alcohol.

At the time, Akbar was a 23-year-old alcoholic, at an age when “you know, you just expect everything that hurts won’t hurt the next morning,” he says. But the pain continued. Upon waking up, he called a taxi. At the hospital, the doctor congratulated him on his luck: the broken bones could have caused blood poisoning. He could have died.

“There are so many of these little minor miracles in my story. None of them are incontrovertible proof of anything. But taken together, I don’t know, it makes one feel like one owes their being here to something,” Akbar says a few Sundays ago during an interview that takes place in his luminous home in Iowa City. There, surrounded by books, records, comics and Kiarostami movie posters, he lives with his spouse, Paige Lewis, a poet with big blue eyes. Both teach classes at the prestigious creative writing program in what is surely the U.S. city with the most authors per capita.

Thirteen years have passed since that “minor miracle” of the pelvis, and the writer is still paying the price. He has to lie down on a sofa to find a position in which he can speak eloquently about Martyr!, his debut novel that was published after a dazzling career as a poet. The book was a hit in the United States. And therein lies the problem: the resulting national tour turned out to be too demanding, and now it hurts to move.

The hero of Martyr! is also a young Iranian poet who grew up in the Midwest. His name is Cyrus Shams, and he’s interested in suicide, obsessed with martyrdom and “enchanted by his own sadness,” according to Akbar. He fights to overcome his addictions, he’s queer, a fan of The Simpsons and often wakes up after a drunken night having pissed himself. Still, the novel — whose plot leads to a surprising final twist (and includes a puddle of urine on a hotel bed) — is not autobiographical. While writing it, Akbar was “dancing,” he says “around those biographical symmetries without firmly planting my flag on either side,” citing literal paragraphs of his own poems and other non-fiction texts. Like when Cyrus/Akbar describes the day he decided to stop drinking. It didn’t take place after fighting with the police or crashing his car into a Burger King. They simply woke up one morning (in the author’s case, on July 12, 2013) and decided to ask for help at a recovery community, one with which Akbar continues to be associated, helping others to get out of the same kind of hole he was once in.

Like the characters in his novel, Akbar feels like he’s living a bonus lifetime. “I’ve seen the lives of so many of my friends and people I love, they accrue some amount of sober time and then they drink or use again and it’s back to where it began. And we’re here talking about a book that I wrote. It’s hard to distinguish this from what I would describe as heaven,” he says.

The author, who has observed Ramadan for the past six years and was fasting during the interview, recalled the two acts of his survival story during a long conversation, interrupting himself ever so often to hold up his left arm, acknowledging that he had “goosebumps.” Once, this took place after he recited the poem by Clarice Lispector that starts and ends the novel (“My God, I just remembered that we die. But — me too?! Don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season.”) At another point, when he remembered the moment that Borges grabbed a handful of desert sand and said, in wonderment, “I am modifying the Sahara.”

Akbar was born in Tehran 36 years ago. His parents came to the United States fleeing the Ayatollah regime when he was three. Martyr!’s protagonist is also an immigrant, though he grew up with the story of his mother’s death aboard Iran Air flight 655, the real-life commercial plane that was felled by a U.S. Navy missile in 1988. Every passengers died, and Cyrus describes his mother’s loss as a “rounding error”: if 289 people had died instead of 290, perhaps his mother would still be alive. He wonders, does that make her a martyr?

It wasn’t hard for Akbar to learn English, but his brother, who is seven years older, didn’t have it as easy. At home, they were forbidden to speak Farsi. Their mother contributed to their assimilation process by bringing random books home from the library. She’d grab them off the shelf of recently returned titles, so his literary diet was diverse: today, a biography of NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Tomorrow, a botany book.

The family lived in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Wisconsin and finally, Indiana, where the writer studied at the prestigious Purdue University and wound up becoming an associate professor. But before that, the brilliant student, a math prodigy, tried alcohol for the first time at the age of 18 on a school trip to Canada. He was a late bloomer in this respect, but soon distinguished himself in the nihilist, patently American art of drinking until you die. “Within a month, I had already tried heroin and was drinking every day,” he recalls. “I’m an addict because I’m an addict. When I was a little kid, I used to lay on a couch with my head angling down and then jump up really quickly, because it made my head feel dizzy.”

For years, his only goal was to stay high. To do that, he saw a psychiatrist who prescribed him “the maximum legal dose of Xanax and Adderall and Neurontin, all of these abusable narcotics,” he says. When he got “new stock,” he’d “sling those for street drugs” and to get the money he needed to buy alcohol. He was consuming all kinds of substances, including opiates, although “the constant was alcohol.” He’d never go more than 12 hours without drinking. “There are these horrific videos from when my friends were at my place and I had passed out in my bed, and I would get up, walk to the fridge, get a beer, chug it and go back to bed.”

And then there was the other “minor miracle” that took place a year after getting sober when, during a routine physical, a doctor discovered that his liver was on the verge of cirrhosis. The nurse told him said that such high levels of bilirubin after 12 months of sobriety confirmed that he had been close to doing himself irreparable damage. “I had to go in to see which side of that Rubicon I was on,” remembers Akbar.

By that time, poetry had become his lifeline due to reasons, the writer cautions, more practical than the healing powers that are at times attributed to words. “It was literally a place to go. I had 18 hours a day of consciousness that I now had to account for. The only thing that I had done with my adult life was go get this drug. Reading poetry, writing poetry was a way to fast-forward through the day without accidentally killing myself, distract me from how miserable I felt.”

So it was that Akbar turned recovery into a brilliant poetic career full of grants and prizes. He has now published two collections of poems: Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017), a glittering entry in the canon of addiction, and Pilgrim Bell (2021), which takes the reader on a spiritual journey. He, who serves as the poetry editor of the magazine The Nation and previously, The Paris Review, has also edited anthologies that focus on these two subjects: Another Last Call and The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. Spirituality is important for him. “I think there are many Muslims around the world who would look at my practice and say, there’s no Islam in that. But I understand Islam to be a direct one-to-one, unmediated relationship between yourself and a higher power. It doesn’t need to be vetted by anyone else’s approval.”

During the pandemic, instead of dedicating himself to yoga or reading the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, Akbar decided to learn to write in narrative form. He put himself on a strict diet of “seven movies and two novels a week” and kleptomania. “I stole from everybody,” he says, mentioning Toni Morrison and her ability to describe a space and Henry James’ skill for practical explanation: “I have a better understanding of Henry James’s characters’ finances than I have of my own,” he jokes.

Cheyenne author Tommy Orange, winner of the National Book Award for his debut There There, a powerful story about contemporary displacement of U.S. tribes, provided help that was essential to Akbar’s process. They’d only met once, in 2019, when Orange was invited to Purdue and the young poet helped host him. From that meeting was born an epistolary relationship that came to involve reciprocal editing. Every Friday during the height of the pandemic, one would send the other material they were working on: in Akbar’s case, Martyr! and in Orange’s, Wandering Stars, which was published last year.

In an email, Orange says that as the novel’s first reader, his friend gave him “permission to do things with language that” he might not have dared on his own. He calls Akbar a writer who is funny, lyrical and full of fury, capable of sincerely posing ancient and important philosophical questions while remaining legible.

Their exchange continued after Akbar and Lewis moved to Iowa City, a town that Spanish poet Luis Muñoz, who has taught classes there for 12 years, describes as “a quiet oasis in the prairie where it snows a lot and there isn’t much to do, making it ideal for writers to concentrate.” The list of names that have passed through the town is hefty and illustrious, from Marilynne Robison and Kurt Vonnegut to John Irving. Here too have been the Berrymans, Cheever and Carver who, in addition to writing, drank themselves into stupors, as essayist Leslie Jamison recounts in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, an outstanding memoir about his alcoholic years as a student in Iowa City. Akbar seems assured, as are writers like Melissa Febos and Donika Kelly, that the town’s reputation of pairing creativity with dipsomania is changing and “a tradition here is emerging of care and community,” he says.

A love poem a day

In married life, such concepts are key. During one moment in the interview, Lewis explains that the two are “actually very, very different writers,” and says when they first met, they set a challenge to “write a poem a day for each other.” “The stakes were so high. If you wrote a bad poem, you would ruin everything. I think without him, I wouldn’t have written basically anything that I’ve written,” Lewis says. Later, when his spouse leaves to run an errand, Akbar denies that there is any rivalry between the two. “It’s an exciting thing for both of us,” he says of their accomplishments. “Paige has a novel coming out in 2026 called Canon and I think it’s going to be an exciting thing.”

Certainly, the release of Martyr! was. Critics celebrated its complex narrative exercise, which achieved notable success in its mix of genres, from its tale of dreams and Iranian stamps to poetry. It also includes real-life news coverage of the plane tragedy and fragments of the book about martyrdom on which Cyrus is working. The character fears the Fox News headlines (the story is set during the first term of Donald Trump, whom Akbar refuses to name in the book, instead referring to him as “President Invective”) should the manuscript, which is titled Book of Martyrs, be discovered — they’d be something along the lines of “Death cult manifesto of Iranian Muslim seized in Indiana.”

Akbar, who also refuses to say Trump’s name in our interview (“I don’t want him to get a Google alert,” he says), has the sense that in certain ways, rapid change is afoot. “It is not lost on me that seeing a book called Martyr! in airport bookstores with my very ethnic name underneath is not something that could have been possible 20 years ago in this country,” says the writer, who added an exclamation point to the book’s title because otherwise it “would have seemed very serious and dour and self-important.” That was certainly not the opinion of Barack Obama, who included it on the list of his favorite books of the summer. Akbar received hateful comments from all sides of the political spectrum. Obama also did, for choosing the book “in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, [and coming from] a president who had used drone warfare against civilian populations,” acknowledges the writer.

Martyr! features a memorable parade of characters, most notably Orkideh, an Iranian artist who turns the last days of her terminal illness into a piece of performance art in the Brooklyn Museum. The result reminds age reader of what used to be called a “great American novel.” But it was not written by a white or Jewish man, but by a Muslim who tells of everyday racism that is often masked by that famous “Midwestern nice” amidst which the author grew up.

When asked if things have improved in recent years, Akbar demurs from giving a reassuring response. “I’m harder now,” he answers. “My reticence in speaking about it is born of the sense that a reader will say, ‘Oh, well I’ve never held someone in TSA questioning for three hours, I’ve never called a child a racial epithet.’ I think a lot of contemporary neoliberal readers use literature to vent certain anxieties: ‘I am one of the good ones.’ Ta-Nehisi Coates uses the phrase ‘the politics of personal exoneration.’ It allows them to separate themselves.”

Another turbulent subject is Iran, which Akbar says he’s not planning on visiting “until the regime falls” — not just because he has been an outspoken critic of the Ayatollah government, but also because he still has two years of required service in the country’s military. “They have all the tanks and the nuclear power,” he says. “We see this beautiful uprising of women around the country, and then they jail and hang the people who are running the protests. I don’t need the carrot of hope in order to continue my attendance to the communities for whom I am responsible, Paige, the young person in recovery with whom I work, my students.”

Before saying goodbye, Akbar offers a final proof of his tendency to seek connections. As an Uber waits outside on the residential street, the writer runs to look for an LP, “one of the most important and sacred” of his life, on which Iranian diaspora producer Omid Walizadeh mixes abstract hip-hop beats with melodies from the time of the Shah of Persia, which Akbar’s father listened to on the cassettes tapes he recorded from the radio and took with him out of Iran. “If Martyr! had a soundtrack, it would be this album,” he says. And once again, he gets goosebumps.

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